Excerpt from THE MÖBIUS BOOK

On the recursive nature of faith in other people, gods, and things.

I’ve been posting a lot about THE MÖBIUS BOOK, as it’s nearly publication time (6/17/25); below is an excerpt from the nonfictional half of the book.

If you’re in New York — I have an event with Leslie Jamison at McNally Jackson Seaport on Monday June 16 and another event at Greenlight Books in Ft. Greene on Tuesday June 17 with Molly Young. If you’re upstate, I’m doing at reading on June 18 at Left Bank in Catskill, NY. More events in August and October, tba.

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The Möbius Book

Odd impulse to catalog these days, not that I can forget them, not that I can remember them clearly.

I woke in the guest room, the attic, a guest in my own home. I’d never slept a night in that room, and staring up at the white clapboard ceiling and walls, I felt I’d been shrunk down and shoved into a doll’s house, and I knew then— again, or for the first time— how grief expands as it constricts, how it turns a person into a toy version of herself.

A man downstairs was The Reason I’d turned from inhabitant to visitor.

My phone rang. The Reason was calling me from the floor below. He wanted to know if I would say goodbye to him before I went to the airport.

What have I been doing all week, I asked, if not saying goodbye to you?

I hung up.

Before we bought that house, when we lived in Berlin, The Reason bought me an unreasonably expensive Japanese teacup. I felt the teacup was too nice to own, feared I would break it, and The Reason often brought up the fact that I did not use the Japanese teacup often enough, that I obviously did not appreciate the teacup’s beauty or The Reason’s generosity, but I thought I did appreciate that beauty, that generosity, and occasionally I told him so, but The Reason insisted I did not, that I could not possibly feel appreciative based on my behavior vis- à- vis the teacup, so I began to think he was probably right, and I put my hopes toward truly becoming the person for whom this teacup had been intended, someone who used it with frequency and pleasure, a person who didn’t feel guilty about being given something so costly that she did not, perhaps, deserve, and I hoped to become this deserving person very soon, at some reachable point in the foreseeable future.

One afternoon during the days I lived as a guest in my home, I returned from a walk in the cold to find The Reason sitting silent in the living room. I took the Japanese teacup from the cupboard, set it on the floor, took a hammer from the tool closet, and set it beside the teacup.

You have to break it, I told him, and after some hesitation, he did.

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The beautiful woman smiled as she told us the story of her grandmother, who had also been beautiful, a woman who had come of age in postwar Greece, knowing hunger, knowing fear intimately. But everything worked out in the end. She survived those desperate years, married, had children, raised children, saw those children have children, and everyone was beautiful.

Recently this woman had asked her grandmother what she would do if she was single and young again and had to marry either a very beautiful man who was evil or a very ugly man who was kind. The grandmother was unapologetic and unequivocal in her answer— evil beauty— which proved the grandmother’s tenacious vanity, the beautiful woman explained.

But it made sense, I said, given her childhood, the war, the things she’d lived through. To me it seemed clear that evilness is just extreme self- preservation, and to be his possession would accompany his protection.

Now I have to revise the whole way I saw her, she said, laughing, and the conversation took over the table: the evil-beauty-ugly-kindness dichotomy. Everyone’s charming, tipsy opinions. The couple on my left was newly in love, and the man on my right was heartbroken, and everyone was dressed up, as our friends had just married in a garden flush with new flowers. I didn’t say anything else on the matter, but I could feel the ease of the grandmother’s decision so clearly; it likely wasn’t Hitler-evil she was imagining in this hypothetical husband, but an average, domestic sort, the kind that’s more Machiavellian than sadistic, a man who can make you feel he knows you better than you know yourself, and oh, how nice it is to feel known.

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Several seasons after those days in the guest room, I found myself living an unexpected life in a different country. When my new friend, Robin, asked if I was writing another novel, I surprised myself when I said, I don’t want to write fiction anymore. I’m tired of being punked.

We both laughed, and she asked what I meant, and I told her that nearly every time I’ve written a novel something happens in between its completion and its publication that makes it clear to me that I knew something I didn’t know I knew while I was writing, and that buried knowledge, that unknown known, has been expressed in the fiction, without my awareness. What I think I’m doing when I write a novel and what I later realize I’ve done is so out of sync that I’ve felt repeatedly shocked and sometimes embarrassed at how I’ve tricked myself once again. Robin smiled darkly. Certainly her work as a poet and a translator had put her in touch with the many strange undertows that can develop beneath the surface of a text.

My friend Heidi’s son once told her he wasn’t going to finish reading a book he’d begun. What’s wrong with the book? she asked. Too fictiony, he said. What do you mean, too fictiony? she asked. Too realistic, he said.

But I know I’m not done. I feel sure I’ll be punked again, because I hate writing fiction with the equal and opposite force of how much I love it. What a stupid, wonderful way to waste my life.

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The last time Lozano was brokenhearted she laid in bed staring at NASA photographs— impossible things in the dark, neon planets or milky nebulas or just space, just huge spaces of space.

She had visited me briefly in Chicago then, where I lived with The Reason, and now I was on her doorstep in Escandón, the first of January, swapping roles in this eternal return of disruption, taking care and being taken care of like that hundred dollars passed between broke friends, finding whomever needs it the most at the moment. Hello, life— this is your old life calling.

I spent mornings in her apartment going through copy-edits of the last novel I wrote while living with The Reason: I fear I am the sort of person who needs to feel some measure of fear in order to love someone, my old self had written, pretending to be someone else.

Well that can’t be good, I tell her, too late.

Months pass, the copy edits are done, the book’s gone to press, then Lozano asks what I’m writing about now. I tell her I’m writing about this.

Which this? This- this? she asks.

Yes, I say, this, my confusion, my friends, self- betrayal, losing faith then gaining it again. The way a story comes back to retell itself.

OK, she says, just make me four inches taller.

And it’s then that it occurs to me— no one ever notices how Lozano is, actually, quite surprisingly tall.

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When my grandmother still remembered who I was, but was beginning to forget, I asked her something I had always wanted to know: why had she and my grandfather, in the late 1960s and in the heart of the Deep South, divorced? There was no greater scandal or humiliation then than the end of a marriage; she’d been ostracized for it, had moved out of town, lived the rest of her life alone.

The divorce paperwork had stipulated that neither she nor my grandfather was permitted to entertain any suitors or remarry, else they’d lose all custody of the children. Each of them stood with an arrow aimed at the other, a mutual spite that couldn’t have come from nowhere, and from the moment I learned of it I wanted to know what had caused it, what had made them choose a life of mandated solitude rather than another day beside the other.

We were together seven years, and then— she hesitated, as she looked up at the ceiling. Well— we were married seven years, and then . . . well, then he died.

(My grandfather lived another forty years, but I didn’t correct her.)

Oh. What did he die of?

Well, she said. It wasn’t the war . . . It wasn’t an accident. It must have been natural causes.

Natural causes. He would have been about the age The Reason was when I last saw him, forty- something, and for many years I found my grandmother’s total amnesia of this pivotal moment of her life to be humorous veering on tragic, but now it seems logical to simply forget painful memories that have nothing else to teach you.

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A youth pastor told me once that when you repented for your sins, Jesus not only forgave you, he immediately forgot what you’d done, an absolution so complete it was wiped from history, and at one point toward the end of his life, the poet John Berryman was found lying face down in bed and hungover as he shouted, These efforts are wasted! We are unregenerate!

Berryman was trying to find God then, but what he was finding instead was that it was very difficult for him to stop drinking.

A commitment to Christianity depends upon believing the story of that regeneration, but while God might eradicate the dark histories of his adherents with ease, it seems the rest of us need stronger and more dangerous things to forget our own: dementia, drugs, brain damage, fiction.

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Thanks for reading. As always, this substack is an outgrowth of my life of writing books, and if you’d rather support my work by buying the books, that is all good with me and I’d be happy to comp you a paid subscription; just send me a message. This one came from a particularly intense process, and I hope it can be a balm for anyone who has ever had a difficult relationship with another person, or a religion, or a body.